Internet Explorer 10 to Power Windows 8 and Cross-Platform Apps

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Late yesterday, Microsoft unveiled the new Windows 8 user interface — or rather, the new Start Menu, and a hint of what Windows 8 apps will look and feel like. The new Start Menu — or home screen — is tiled, like Windows Phone 7 (WP7), while apps themselves look like a smooth amalgam of the Windows 7 and WP7-Metro design paradigms. Like Windows 7, apps can be Aero Snapped to the sides of the screen, and an Aero Flip-like interface lets you switch between running apps with a flick of the thumb. Like Windows Phone 7, the Windows 8 home screen is made up of Live Tiles, which are an awesome — and fully customizable — innovation that turn your home screen into a web-connected, regularly-updated portal to your email, social networks, calendar, and most-used apps — or widgets that show the latest weather, news, and YouTube’s videos.. The Windows 8 home screen, put simply, is the classic Start Menu, desktop, and Windows 7 taskbar all rolled into one.

The new UI is exciting and fantastically shiny, but really it’s just a wide-screen re-imagining of the WP7 interface. The main thing, and the key to Microsoft’s Windows 8 strategy, is that this same UI will run across every form factor imaginable: desktops, laptops, sub-notebooks, netbooks, tablets, and maybe even large-screen smartphones. With the contiguous UI comes the expectation that the same apps will run across all Windows 8-based computers — and indeed, that will be the case. Leveraging the new-found hardware-accelerated power of web browsers, and rapid advances in JavaScript performance, Windows 8 apps will be created using a new set of HTML5 and JavaScript developer tools. Unlike browser-based apps, Windows 8 apps will have full access to the computer’s hardware via new APIs that will be unveiled at Microsoft’s new BUILD conference in September. Rather than being extensions, Windows 8 apps will make real, installed apps out of HTML5 and JavaScript.

What we don’t know is how these HTML5/JavaScript programs will be packaged. Leaked builds of Windows 8 have contained “AppX” packages, which closely resemble the layout of WP7 apps, which use the cross-platform Silverlight runtime. Given Microsoft’s playing-down of Silverlight, however, and its beatific and zealous support of open web technologies, it’s unlikely that Windows 8 applications will use Silverlight. Instead, Windows 8 apps will run on Internet Explorer 10 — or its rendering and JavaScript engines, anyway. There might not be an address bar or a discrete back button, but it’s the Trident and Chakra engines under the hood.

It gets better, though: IE10, which will probably be released just before or with Windows 8, has already been successfully ported to ARM; IE10 is already running well on ARM chips like Nvidia’s Kal-El chip. In other words, web developers will be able to create Windows 8 apps in a similar way to how Chrome and Firefox web apps are made, and have them run across every form-factor. Don’t forget, Windows 8 will have an app store, too — just like the Chrome Web Store.

This doesn’t mean that every Windows 8 app will be written in HTML5 and JavaScript, and Microsoft’s .NET framework will work on Windows 8, and presumably be able to tie into the slick new UI. Microsoft’s demo clearly shows that the current version of Windows 8 is just a fancy UI on top of a Windows 7 machine, and all Windows 7 software will continue to run on Windows 8 — or at least the x86 version of it. The bigger question is whether software houses (including Microsoft) create Windows 8-specific, designed-for-touch-interface versions of their apps — or if they will just port their code to ARM and leave it at that. With the possibility of creating a single app for every desktop, laptop, tablet, and smartphone, however, we will almost certainly see some developers embrace Microsoft’s new-found love of the HTML5/JavaScript bandwagon.

Finally, while the UI is undoubtedly very beautiful, it has a problem that will be difficult to overcome. While a grid of tiles is perfect for a tablet or smartphone display, it won’t necessarily translate very well to mouse-and-keyboard or touchpad control. Moving a pointer around a screen is slow and aggravating at the best of times, and a tile-based UI will involve a lot of pointing. Keyboard navigation can be used to scroll through the tiles, but selecting specific, oddly-arranged tiles will be tricky. The video clearly shows that the left and right side of the screen are both used — which is great if you have two pointing devices, but most desktops and laptops only have one.

It will be a taxing task for Microsoft to get the balance right, to balance big-block sparsity with typographical Live Tile information overload; to balance touch interfaces with its installed base of hundreds of millions of mouse-and-keyboard users. Microsoft will live or die on the success or failure of Windows 8; it will live or die on its ability to seamlessly merge almost computing form factor in existence. No pressure, MS. No pressure.

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